Research Interests

My most fundamental interests reach far and wide, touching on (almost) everything to do with the Church, its theology, and its practice. It is my conviction that biblical studies is necessarily the discipline of and for the Church. Accordingly, the nitty-gritty biblical research and writing that I do on a day-to-day basis flows out of my desire to serve the Church.

My research centers primarily upon the Old Testament (OT), especially its Greek translation commonly known as the Septuagint (LXX). If you are not familiar with the LXX, it comes as no surprise to me; classicists and seminary graduates alike often have only a dim conception of just what the Septuagint actually is, and therefore avoid it. Perhaps that is the right instinct, but I hope to help change the scenario in some small way, helping to familiarize Septuagint studies for biblical scholars and the odd passerby from neighboring disciplines. The Septuagint is an incredible (and incredibly ignored) part of understanding post-classical (Koine) Greek, social and religious aspects of the Hellenistic world, and the development of early Christianity, among others. I have a separate page devoted to introducing Septuagint studies, if you care to dive in a bit further.

Of course, the Septuagint would not exist without the Hebrew Old Testament, and so one of my primary academic loves (and the focus of the occasional side-project) lies there. While the LXX requires study as a text in its own right for many reasons (which drive the bulk of my research projects), it also deserves attention as one of the earliest witnesses to the Hebrew OT. There is a significant need for greater familiarity with the complexities involved in Septuagint studies in order to understand what it says and how, the Jewish people who produced it, and the Hebrew text that precipitated it. Most of this involves lots of research in Hellenistic Egypt, diaspora Judaism and paleographical studies.

Most of the biblical scholarship I do involves a good deal of work in linguistics. My dissertation is focused on Greek lexical semantics and lexicography, an area I hope to work more in (for both Hebrew and Greek). I have also done some work in conceptual blending and mental spaces, offshoots of cognitive linguistics, in the Hebrew OT. Additionally, I have teamed up with Steven E. Runge to organize a conference to address prepositional semantics in Greek, the proceedings of which should eventually appear in print.